Big games may be hazardous to your health

New England Journal of Medicine. They determined that soccer fans experienced more than double the number of heart attacks while watching televised matches of the 2006 World Cup soccer championships in Munich, Germany, compared to other times of the year. The World Cup is Europe's soccer equivalent of America's Super Bowl, the one sports event that builds fan momentum until the big game.

The Super Bowl is the championship game of the National Football League (NFL). It and its ancillary festivities constitute Super Bowl Sunday, which over the years has become the most-watched U.S. television broadcast of the year, and has become likened to a de facto U.S. national holiday.

While history suggests European soccer fans can get a bit more worked up than the average American football fan, doctors think there are some valid warnings to be shared. "I know a little bit about the Super Bowl," study author Dr. Gerhard Steinbeck of Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich said in a telephone interview. "It's reasonable to think that something quite similar might happen."

He and his colleagues present their results in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine. They blamed emotional stress for the heart problems, but they note that lack of sleep, overeating, wolfing down junk food, boozing and smoking might have played a role too. Previous studies suggest that events like earthquakes and war can boost the risk of heart problems.

Findings for soccer have been inconsistent. The new work "confirms something people have been highly skeptical about ... that soccer (would) produce that kind of emotional investment that might trigger a heart attack," said psychologist Douglas Carroll of the University of Birmingham in England. Dr. Sanjay Gupta explains how your excitement over your team might be dangerous. "People who are not interested in sport find it very difficult to comprehend this," said Carroll, who in 2002 reported a link between World Cup soccer and heart attacks in England.

The new paper included heart attacks, cardiac arrests, episodes of irregular heartbeat and activations of automatic implanted defibrillators. The researchers noted the number of cases reported in the greater Munich area during World Cup competition in Germany in the summer of 2006. They compared that with the totals for similar periods in 2003 and 2005, and for several weeks before and after the tournament.

The effect was strongest in people with known heart disease. So on Super Bowl Sunday, such people and others with known risks for heart disease -- such as high blood pressure or diabetes -- should take extra care of themselves, said Dr. Lori Mosca, director of preventive cardiology at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.

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